In other posts I have discussed the benefits of a prescribed practice routine.
A process and not a goal. It builds a foundation on which your musical interpretations can stand. If one gets bogged down worrying about technical details, a musical-rhetorical presentation is not possible. Once you and your instrument become one with each other, you may begin a dialogue with the music and your listeners.
In another post I've given detailed instructions for practicing,
the flute player's prescription, with an underlying message of "if you do this, it will come," that is, a relaxed physical technique. The other part of that message is that if you do exactly as prescribed, you will make progress.
And in yet another post, I pointed out that there has been one student who has done e
xactly what was prescribed and guess what? He has made excellent progress. In fact, in the past few months student Al Pha has taken it "to the next level," as people say.
I recently heard Al Pha play in a house concert. The loud cracking sound you all heard was me, breaking my arm patting myself on the back again. One small suggestion made a couple of months ago turned into a huge leap in playing technique.
The downside to Al's recent leap in physical technique is that he now finds himself in the cracks, so to say. He's a "'tweener," now too advanced to get any benefit from playing with a current local group of players, but not yet in the place to work with people who are driven to play professionally. Two comments here: 1. Al could benefit from working with the current group if he chose to work on leadership skills, and making musical analyses in real time (with some prep work in advance, of course), such as "the bass line moves in this direction at this rate, so the treble lines need to do X"); 2. Mr. Pha could get to the place where he could work professionally; Al just needs to decide whether or not he wants to do that. Number 2 comes with several steamer trunks of less-than-fun things, such as dealing with the gross insecurities of people who get threatened by anyone with a musical backbone, ensemble leaders who feel obliged to put everyone in their place, or my favorite, inferior players who feel a need to try to "lead" in their section, and point out any flaws (real or imagined) of the person sitting with them, regardless of their own ability.
It is one thing to go through this apprenticeship of dealing with the neuroses of other people when you are in your twenties and perhaps still in college, trying to figure out what you want to do. It is quite a another to deal with this when you are an established and well-respected professional in an unrelated field. Or even when you are an established professional in mid-career (my bacon continues to get burnt to a crisp when I sign on for a gig and I hear the conductor say something like, "I've always thought it would be fun to do this piece with a Baroque orchestra," and "I'm going to conduct this section in 8." Yeah. Right. I bought a scalpel on eBay and I think it will be fun to practice appendectomies on people. And, yeah, right, the ALLA BREVE mensuration symbol of course means that it must be conducted in eight. Eight what? Eight slaps upside the head because you are too lazy to do anything but indulge your ignorance? Eight times I dunk your head in the privy (and only pulling it out seven times) because of yet another uninformed decision?
There are, to be sure, some positive aspects that Al Pha can look forward to. For one, musical decisions are, in theory, not based on someone's technical limitations but on what the group feels the music has to say. And music can be made with minimal effort spent on playing together, working out cues, and playing in tune. In retrospect, the musical benefits reaped in the past twenty-five years far outweigh the Gauntlet of Psychos that had to be run in order to get to where I am. And, in the same way that mushrooms have a symbiotic relationship with trees, insecure knuckleheads have their own symbiotic relationship with good gigs and players. They will always be there but, as noted in David Arora's
Mushrooms Demystified, these toxic fungi are "better kicked than picked."
Stay tuned for further Al Pha updates.
